AngelList India head’s second micro venture fund closes at $15 mn

By Beena Parmar

  • 15 Apr 2021
Credit: 123RF.com

Utsav Somani, India head of US-based crowdfunding platform AngelList, said his second micro venture fund iSeed II has closed at $15 million (Rs 112.7 crore).

The vehicle will invest in over 50 startups over the next two years.  

iSeed II has been raised from global funds including RTP Global, FJ Labs, Tribe Capital, Hummingbird Ventures, Kamco Jedi Fund, Somani said in a blogpost. 

Apart from AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, new Limited Partners (LPs) include Prasanna Sankar, co-founder and tech chief of employee management unicorn Rippling; and Vinny Pujji of growth equity fund Left Lane Capital. 

Other new LPs include Lachy Groom, angel investor and former executive of payments major Stripe; and Ankur Nagpal, founder and CEO of Teachable. 

Other investors in iSeed II are Sam Shank, CEO of booking app HotelTonight; Ankush Gera, CEO of Junglee Games; and Josh Hix co-founder and former CEO of meal kit delivery app Plated. 

Jack Herrick, founder and CEO of wikiHow, and Bryce Maddock, co-founder and CEO of IPO-bound TaskUs, have also invested. 

 iSeed’s first fund was launched in May last year and anchored by Ravikant with a corpus of $5 million. So far, iSeed I has made investments in 35 startups, co-investing with institutional investors including Sequoia Capital India and Lightspeed India Partners.  

Some investments from iSeed’s first fund include those in Velocity, FloBiz, PagarBook, GoKwik, RocketLane, BimaPe and Pepper Content. 

Last year, iSeed I also invested in Mumbai and Denver-based cloud-based platform CometChat.   

Founders of Xiaomi, Thumbtack, Hike, Flutter, Bolt, TaskUs, CoinList and WikiHow had invested in iSeed I. 

San Francisco-based AngelList was founded in 2010 by Ravikant and Babak Nivi, and the syndicate programme was launched in 2013. 

In 2016, the group appointed Somani, former Delhi chapter lead of LetsVenture and a member of the Indian Angel Network, to lead its operations in India.